"The intent is to switch on this option by default rather sooner than later, so we can start preparing for shipping 10.0-RELEASE with Clang as the default system compiler, and deprecating gcc." Good to see Clang/LLVM continue to gain as much steam as it does. This will only make GCC better.

The point is whether you have resources for that.
You can propel indefinitely good architectures only if you have infinite experienced developer input.

Perhaps, but in this case they did get the developer feedback. If they don't get the architecture right now, they will risk bloat by spaghetti code in the long run and it will be that much harder to switch away from systemd.

Building a correct architecture is easy, the real difficulty lies in having a vision and planning ahead for possible scenario's and changes that may impact that architecture. Things that are overlooked now, will cause trouble later. That's why it's a good thing that non-Linux developers are alarmed about the hard dependency. Now is the time to get things right without too much hassle.